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Restore volunteer award under Thérèse Casgrain's name

Author of the article:

Robert N. Wilkins

Publishing date:

July 30, 2014 • 3 minute read

Therese Casgrain, president of the League for Women's Rights in Quebec from 1929 to 1942, is pictured during an election campaign in a 1967 photo. Casgrain, a feminist icon and Quebec heroine who died in 1981, has been quietly removed from a national honour, to be replaced by an volunteer award bearing the prime minister's banner.files/ CP

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When on Saturday, Nov. 13, 1909, British cabinet minister Winston Churchill stepped off the train at the English city of Bristol, there were more people waiting to welcome him than the usual queue of municipal officials. Theresa Garnett, a militant suffragette, lunged at Churchill with a horsewhip, striking him several times while yelling, “Take that, in the name of the insulted women of England.”

Needless to say, Churchill was stunned by the repeated assault. This future British prime minister had been struck several times about the face but was otherwise unhurt. For her desperate act, Garnett was sentenced to a month in prison.

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It was not Churchill’s first encounter with the movement for women’s prerogatives, particularly the right to vote. In January of that same year, he had been continually interrupted while speaking at an official dinner in Birmingham. Reflecting on that interruption, the Montreal Star chauvinistically observed on Jan. 14, 1909: “If a ‘suffragette’ can disconcert Winston Churchill by talking in competition with him, she must be a veteran campaigner. Possibly the point of her offence was that she interrupted an Englishman at his dinner. If the war gets too cruel, the ladies may be met by harsher treatment than compelling their leaders to wear unbecoming clothes while in prison.”

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The suffragette movement had begun to emerge in Canada around the same time. In November of 1909, English radical (and much later, Tory convert) Emmeline Pankhurst addressed the Canadian Suffrage Association at Massey Hall in Toronto. And just six months earlier, Montreal Mayor Louis Payette was himself assaulted by local suffragette Helen Wright. One day in April, while in the mayor’s office with socialist leader Albert St. Martin, Wright lost patience with Payette and smashed his inkstand with a heavy paperweight.

Despite systemic resistance to the movement, progress was slowly being made a little bit everywhere. For instance, due to a certain liberalization of voting qualifications, an estimated 8,000 women were permitted to cast a ballot in the Montreal municipal election of February 1, 1910, particularly unmarried property owners. Due to a heavy door-to-door campaign, many of these new voters did enthusiastically exercise their right to vote.

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At the federal level, some women — mothers, sisters and daughters of men fighting overseas in the First World War — were granted the right to cast a ballot in the 1917 national election. In the 1921 federal election, this freedom was extended to all women 21 years of age and older, although there were a few restrictions.

Manitoba became the first Canadian jurisdiction to accord women the right to vote in a provincial election, Quebec was the last. It was not until 1940 that the Liberal government of Premier Adélard Godbout passed the necessary legislation making the change. Most conservative forces in the province, including the church, opposed the move.

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Friday of next week will mark the 70th anniversary of the historic 1944 Quebec election. Central to the commemoration will be recognition of the role that Thérèse Casgrain played in helping secure the vote for women.

Casgrain was one of the leading suffragettes and feminists in Quebec in the early 20th century. She later went on to become the first female leader of a political party in Canada in 1951 when she became leader of the Parti social démocratique du Québec, which was the Quebec wing of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the national precursor to today’s federal New Democratic Party.

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Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau appointed her to the Senate in 1970. She died in 1981. A year later, Trudeau created a national volunteer award in her honour. This is the same Thérèse Casgrain Volunteer Award that has been in the news this week. As Canadian Press reported, the Conservative government has moved to eliminate the award and rebrand it under the sponsorship of the office of the prime minister as the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Award.

The award should be restored under the Casgrain name. An ardent federalist and resolute progressive, Casgrain deserves no less.

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